I normally try to do this article earlier, but I somehow fell behind with all my blogging.  I am going to blame Purdue’s dismal performance.  But I have 3 1/2 hours until the Final Four begins, and I have already put in my handicapping, so it is time to catch up on my standard yearly entries into the blog.  I will also try to do my blog that grades the conferences.

To be fair, I am going to provide some initial feedback and then spend the rest of these articles breaking my own feedback.  Just calling out my own double standard before I get started.  But these articles have to have some criticism in them, and typically, that criticism happens using after the fact information – which is unfair.

At the end of the day, I can’t really complain about what the committee did.  It has been a fun wide-open tournament, and this is one of the best parts of this whole process – it is really almost impossible to mess up the tournament by the selection committee.  Each conference guarantees one team to represent them, the committee takes most of the teams remaining that are consensus top teams – which you can tell whether you use statistical rankings or the polls.

Lets start this with I think the Selection Committee did a very good, non-controversial job.  I (and many other real bracketologists) almost predicted the bracket, so it is hard to complain at what they did.  From my prediction, they left out Rutgers (who breaks one of my rules that I will state later, so I am good with), they added Nevada (who is a non-power conference team that I support making more spots available too), and I got 66 of the teams within 1 seed of where the committee placed them.  But I need to say this – I don’t create a bracket that is my feeling on the 68 best teams, I create a bracket that I think the Selection Committee will select.  And so, some of my feedback will go there.

As a Purdue fan, I am going to start with this statement.  I hate it when a top team loses how it is said that they should have never been that seed.  The selection committee got the top 4 seeds right – Alabama, Houston, Kansas and Purdue.  Yes – they all lost early.  Purdue lost a game they never should have lost.  But that doesn’t mean that they were not deserving of a 1 seed.  If you look at the polls, the 61 pollsters of the AP poll had Purdue as the #3 team in the country.  If you look at the Coaches Poll, the 32 voters had Purdue as the #3 team in the country.  So, if the Selection Committee had been the 93 pollsters, Purdue would have been a 1 seed.  If you go to the Bracket Matrix, my quick count had 229 bracketologists.  Only 12 of them did not rank the Boilers as a 1 seed.  Purdue clearly had a flaw in how they play.  But to say another team deserved the 1 seed means that you were able to look into the future.  Now, if you want to say that Purdue is the biggest choke artist of college basketball, I won’t be able to argue with you.

Now that I have said that, I am going to probably use tournament results later to state what I would like to change.  I know things won’t change, but as a crazy blogger, I have to rant about something.

My biggest complaint ties to two things.  I feel that conference records have to matter more than they do, and that the committee uses the non-conference strength of schedule to punish teams.

I like the sentiment that all the games matter equally.  I even agree with that statement.  But it is hard enough comparing two teams from different conferences who have no opponents who were the same.  While conferences do have unbalanced schedules, they can still be evaluated much more fairly.  The SEC is the best example of this, and is the place where I think the poorest seeding mistake was made.

Lets look at the top of the SEC standings:

• 1) Alabama (16-2, 31-6, 1 AP, 2 Coaches, 2 NET)
• 2) Texas A&M (15-3, 25-10, 17 AP, 17 Coaches, 19 NET)
• 3) Kentucky (12-6, 22-12, 28 AP, 27 Coaches, 26 NET)
• 4T) Missouri (11-7, 25-10, 23 AP, 24 Coaches, 42 NET)
• 4T) Tennessee (11-7, 25-11, 20 AP, 21 Coaches, 4 NET)
• 4T) Vanderbilt (11-7, 22-15, NR in polls, 81 NET)

Obviously, Vanderbilt didn’t make the tournament – I actually think that is a shame despite their NET ranking being awful.  Because they still finished 3 games in the standings ahead of Arkansas and Mississippi State.  At some point, I will need to look deeper into that, but for now, lets focus on the easier argument, Texas A&M.

Based on the published S-curve, the committee made Tennessee (14) a 4 seed, Kentucky (23) a 6 seed, Texas A&M (25) a 7 seed, and Missouri (27) a 7 seed.  The Aggies beat Tennessee and finished 4 games ahead in the standings.  You could say that they were punished for non-conference losses to teams like Murray State and Wofford.  But each of these teams had a blemish (maybe not as bad as those), but the Aggies also won the games in the conference that these other teams did not.  They also made it all the way to the SEC championship game (which these other teams did not).  The polls and NET agreed that Texas A&M should be a 5 seed.  But instead a non-ranked team in Kentucky got put in front of them.

Maybe it was because of the bad losses, but I suspect it was more because of the non-conference strength of schedule (although the Big 12 schools didn’t get penalized so maybe it was the bad losses).  Texas A&M had a NET NC SOS of 248.  From a quick scan, the only at-large teams with a worse NC SOS were Kansas State (310), TCU (292), Northwestern (295), Penn State (278) and Providence (289).

But when you look at the schedule closer, the Aggies played a road game at Memphis, a neutral court game against Boise State and Colorado, a road game against DePaul, and a home game against Oregon State.  Yes, DePaul, Colorado and Oregon State might not be the best from the power conferences, but how many teams played 3 of them in non-conference.  And then add two non-power conference teams that made the tournament.  Lets take Boise State to compare – they played Colorado, Washington State (and of course, Texas A&M) – so 3 power conference schools – all on neutral courts.  None of their other opponents out of conference made the tournament (so certainly no one like Memphis or Boise State).  Their NC SOS was 135th.  So, I would argue that the Aggies played 2 more tougher teams, and ended up with a ranking 113 teams worse.  If you play a team that really stinks, it crushes your ranking – which is a shame because the committee uses that as a reason to hold teams back (ask Rutgers and Clemson who both had NC SOS > 300).

I struggle that a 25-11 team that went 11-7 in conference gets a 4 seed, and a 25-10 team that went 15-3 in the same conference gets a 7 seed, especially when both the polls both ranked the 7 seed team higher than the 4 seed.  I think this is really the only place the committee made a huge seeding mistake.

In the next post, I will go deeper into what I would change – and conference record is involved (along with me being hypocritical and using tournament results).